For the Earth is Hollow & I Have Touched the Sky
by bj
Summary: Colin wants to build for himself a body of systems. ColinEphram, pre "Miracle of Everwood".


it's: for the earth is hollow, and i have touched the sky  
by: bj  
in sum: colin wants to construct for himself a body of systems.  
label: colin. colin/amy, amy/ephram, ephram/colin. natch.  
sissies: nope.  
legalities: don't own, don't sue.  
i say: because i love my shippers, even if i don't ship the ship. even if the ship seems to have sunk six feet below. set vaguely around "snow job".  
for windy: just 'cause. and dude, i only had the first three and last two scenes done when the thing happened, so this is a totally valid dedication.  
muse: original star trek. not the best episode, but definitely in my top five.  
you say: all comments appreciated, answered, and archived. allcanadiangirl@lycos.com.  
  
  
**for the earth is hollow, and i have touched the sky**  
  
When he's in hospital in Denver, Colin's parents make sure there's a television in his room. Colin doesn't particularly like tv, the bright colours and sounds sometimes make his head hurt, but his mother says he loves it.  
  
"You love to watch sports," she says. "College basketball, and hockey."  
  
He loves sports, she says. He can't call up any feeling for the riotous momentum and movement on the screen, the single-minded striving for a goal, for points. It actually seems pointless to him. So, he supposes, he feels apathy rather than affection.  
  
"And the Superbowl," she says. "We watch the Superbowl every year with the Abbotts."  
  
He doesn't even know what that is, but he nods. "Okay," he says, and he watches her face fall because "Superbowl" has not sparked a memory.  
  
"Bright watches a lot of cartoons," she says, and Colin has no idea who she's talking about. "You were never really into them, even when you were a little boy." She smiles, he can see tears in her eyes and it makes his chest hurt. "Just wrestling, and racing, and team sports." She touches his face.  
  
He thinks he does love her, but he's not sure if it's out of obligation or pity.  
  
  
  
  
Amy comes to see him. At least he thinks it's Amy. She's familiar, but she's stopped introducing herself every time and he can't be entirely certain he remembers her name. He's pretty sure he should remember her name by now, she visits him a lot.  
  
When Amy visits, she brings a thin yellow newspaper and reads him stories from it. She says names and then pauses, looking at him expectantly. He shakes his head and she reads on.  
  
One day she brings a video tape and presses it into the slot under the television set. Loud laughter and forced voices assault him. She tells him they used to watch this show every week, that he thought it was the funniest thing ever. He shakes his head, the jokes make no sense. Her face doesn't fall the way his mother's does, it freezes and firms, then breaks into a bright smile.  
  
"It's okay," she says, and he knows for a certainty that it is not. She takes the tape from the machine and puts it back in her purse.  
  
  
  
  
On the evening before Colin's last day of rehab he can't sleep. The other bed in the room is empty so he turns the tv on, volume low. He doesn't want a nurse to come and press a sedative on him. He hates the fuzzy drowning feeling drugs give him, it's too much like the first week out of the coma.  
  
He flips past news and music videos and harshly-lit comedies. Slowness of movies, the tense close-ups of dramas. Finally he lets the remote slip from his fingers. He's tired of the apathy he seems cast in--he doesn't think he cares about anything; he closes his eyes.  
  
And someone on the screen is speaking about care and vision. He opens his eyes, the colours are bright, there is too much glitter. The figures are fuzzy, faces blurred like sleep deprivation. He watches. He doesn't understand the words, but the hands and bodies move as stiffly as his own. The world on the television looks as fake as he feels.  
  
  
  
  
After he gets home he finds Star Trek again, he watches it secretly between exercising his arm and smiling at strangers who love him. He learns the names of these fictional characters, and the names of the starship's crew.  
  
He wants to understand the way their world works, the angles and physics, how they function in this small town without change, without new lifeforms and civilisations.  
  
Asleep, he sees Amy--he knows her name now, for a certainty, it is stored in his mainframe--with her eyes sequined and spotlit, her mouth slightly open, she stares up at something pink and fluttering, a thin scarf on the wind. Really, a deep-space creature which lives on foggy memories and lost boys.  
  
When he should be reading or squeezing sand-filled balloons, he writes words like "phaser" and "warpdrive" and "neutrino" on a pad of paper under his pillow. When he should be thinking about school, he thinks about captains and first officers and the laddered order of existence.  
  
He meets Ephram; he learns that the vague Dr. Brown is a man, not an apparition. And Ephram is of the same race. Colin looks at Ephram's blue-veined fingers and thinks this race must be like Vulcans--incredible power in their hands.  
  
He never needs to say hello to Ephram. He says it, but he doesn't need to. He likes that, he likes the lack of words, and that he and Ephram choose to use them anyway.  
  
He doesn't understand why Ephram is so shunned. Colin doesn't see anything wrong with him. Maybe it's deeper than that. Maybe Colin can't tell the difference between white-black and black-white anymore.  
  
Colin wonders what you do with a captain who can't remember his orders.  
  
  
  
  
His mother touches his face, his shoulders. She adjusts his sling uselessly. She flutters around him, even when she's sitting across the dining room table. She cuts his food for him before they eat.  
  
"It's your favourite," she says. Smiling, smiling like a toothpaste commercial.  
  
Colin pokes at the bites of meat, hoping it tastes better than his other 'favourite' foods.  
  
Beside him Amy smiles, and she imparts to him a secret glance, a speaking look. Colin's confused. She gives a tiny gesture with her fork towards the meat, still smiling. He feels his forehead draw into ridges, he sees her bite the corner of her bottom lip and look down at her own plate.  
  
He wants to tell her he's sorry, it's just that he hasn't had his translator repaired yet.  
  
  
  
  
Colin flips the page of his notepad and writes "quantum mechanics" very slowly, making sure the letters are well-spaced, the curves and lines graceful.  
  
"Mechanics," he says silently, moving his lips around the word.  
  
This is what the universe is made of. He thinks of his father bent into the wide maw that is a car's open hood.  
  
Gears, fluids, pumps. Battery. Colin smiles faintly, and writes "solenoid". An automechanoid.  
  
Belts. Fans. Wires. Colin grips his pencil hard, feels the wood against the joints of his fingers.  
  
Grills and filters, purifiers, oil. Pressure, conduit.  
  
The universe is mechanics, and Colin wants to work as simply. He wants to construct for himself a body of systems, but his flesh is gelatinous and uncooperative.  
  
  
  
  
Standing beside Bright in the cafeteria line, Colin decides he's a commodore, not a captain. Really, he's on someone else's ship, and everyone is fooled by his resemblance to whoever actually holds command. Eventually they'll figure it out, this elaborate, accidental ruse. The people will be shocked and unnerved. They will question the very foundations of their society; they will come through with independent minds and forward-seeing eyes, free from the monolithic constraints of his image.  
  
And he will be no one to them.  
  
He nods when Bright points at a sandwich in the case. It'll do, he figures. He'll have to get by on prepared, preserved rations until they let him go. Life support must remain functional.  
  
Soon, though, the chainlink door of the menagerie will open, and he will breathe his own atmosphere.  
  
  
  
  
Colin finds himself thinking of the short minutes and hours he hides with Ephram as leave.  
  
They sit side by side on Colin's bed, the spine of a thick comic book between their thighs. Colin's good arm pressed against Ephram's.  
  
"Tell me about this guy again?" Colin says, and he doesn't even need to point to the dark-swatched character he's talking about.  
  
Ephram grins and speaks incredibly fast, but not quite so quickly that Colin can't catch his words; wring every possible meaning from them.  
  
The door opens behind them and they both turn. Colin maneuvers skilfully so he doesn't get poked in the eye by Ephram's nose.  
  
"Hi," Amy says.  
  
"Hey," Colin says, smiling. The sight of her, her golden hair, and the shroud of focus which surrounds her: these are welcome things.  
  
"Hi, Ephram," Amy says, flicking her gaze away from Colin and then back.  
  
"Um, yeah," Ephram says. He faces forward again; Colin looks at his profile. The odd alien line of it. Ephram slaps the comic closed and stands up, one hand shoving into his pocket. "Hi. Look, Col, I should go--"  
  
"Yes," Amy says.  
  
Colin looks between them. He may not be Vulcan, nor does he yet have an elaborate sensor system built around his collarbone, but the way Ephram narrows his eyes at the sound of Amy's voice surely isn't normal physics.  
  
"My sister's expecting to be picked up, like, half an hour ago," Ephram says, still looking at Colin. The tilt of his mouth is funny and Colin smiles back, but Ephram looks angry too.  
  
Colin thinks it's anger, anyway. He's never observed Ephram angry, never entered it in the log he keeps at the back of his throat.  
  
Ephram shuffles out of the room sideways. Amy barely gives him enough space to get through the door, and Colin wonders from the way her lowered eyes follow Ephram's trailing wrist whether it's from annoyance or.  
  
What?  
  
He's never observed that either.  
  
  
  
  
Colin pretends he's writing in transliterated Romulan as he conjugates Spanish verbs. His mother told him he didn't have to do a language this year, that everyone was willing to cut him slack because of--  
  
He'd shaken his head. He wants to know the ways in which people speak. He wants to have a research log for the galaxy to envy.  
  
Ephram thinks he's crazy for not taking an out on "the freaking Espagnol".  
  
"Agua?" Ephram says.  
  
"Water," Colin says when Ephram makes a disgusted noise and slaps his book shut.  
  
"Who goes to Spain?" Ephram says. "Who goes to Spain and goes places people don't speak English? Or Mexico, even."  
  
Colin looks down at his notes. He wants to. He wants to go everywhere.  
  
  
  
  
Amy holds his hand at the lookout and Colin tries to stay still for her.  
  
  
  
  
Dr. Brown takes Ephram's book away and tells him to go practise. Ephram rolls his eyes and Colin follows him into a room with a couch and a piano.  
  
"You can go if you want," Ephram says.  
  
Colin shrugs. "I'm okay."  
  
Ephram's face moves strangely and he shrugs back. "Whatever."  
  
Colin rubs his slung wrist as Ephram plays, and Colin remembers the resonance of crystal, the pulsation of living rock. Another language he doesn't know, another world he can't comprehend.  
  
He feels the bones on top of his hand, and wonders if Ephram's physiology is naturally or necessarily adapted to stretch octave dialects and regional sharps, flats.  
  
Colin wonders how he knows these words.  
  
  
  
  
Amy touches his face gently, and he closes his eyes. She rests her hand over half of his face, her thumb brushing his jaw. He holds her hand.  
  
He holds tighter, and he tries to reach out to her from the inside.  
  
Nothing.  
  
Of course it doesn't work for non-Vulcans, he thinks. Was stupid to think it would.  
  
"I love you," Amy says quietly, and she moves her hand around his back. She holds him very close.  
  
  
  
  
He wonders, sitting behind Ephram at Dr. Brown's computer, watching monkeymen and trolls spill their greenish-gold guts across the screen, if Ephram could do it.  
  
Because Dr. Brown's hands--give life, and with his Ephram speaks an enormous language of vibrations.  
  
Incredible power in their hands.  
  
  
  
  
The particular physics of Ephram fill an entire notedpad now, angles and symbols Colin creates to explain the phenomena he has experienced since returning to this world to which he's never been. He calls it human calculus, wondering how he knows those words, and considers it his own language.  
  
Let them translate that, he thinks.  
  
  
  
  
He watches Ephram watch Amy run her fingers across the back of his neck while she talks to her friends. He watches Ephram watch Amy's hand. Or, he thinks for a split second of warp, he watches Ephram watch his neck.  
  
  
  
  
"I'll see you later," Amy says when he declines a ride home. Bright blinks at him.  
  
Colin is briefly confused by the sphere of unreality he detects around Bright, then he remembers, and he remembers guilt.  
  
Ephram is beside him suddenly, with his bike, and Amy gets in the truck. She waves, Colin waves, and Ephram says, "Let's go, man."  
  
Colin wishes this race didn't have a concept of guilt.  
  
  
  
  
In Ephram's room they do homework on the floor, then they sit close together on the edge of Ephram's bed and read.  
  
"_Manga_," Ephram says slowly.  
  
"_Comic_," Colin says slowly.  
  
"Shut up," Ephram says, turning the page.  
  
Colin protests. "I wasn't done!"  
  
He tries to turn the page back and laughs when Ephram makes a frightened noise.  
  
"You're going to tear it," Ephram says. Annoyance.  
  
"I wasn't done reading the page." Colin shoves Ephram with his slung elbow. "You're such a comic Nazi."  
  
Ephram shoves back, laughing now. "If you didn't read at the pace of a frickin' glacier--"  
  
"That's the TBI!"  
  
"Right," Ephram says.  
  
Colin tries to push him over, reaching for the book with his good hand.  
  
"Get lost," Ephram yelps. He puts a leg over Colin's knees to keep him at bay.  
  
He grabs Colin's shoulder for balance. Colin goes still, he's not entirely sure why.  
  
Warm, warm, he thinks, a source of heat like nothing else.  
  
Ephram stops laughing. "What?" he says.  
  
Colin swallows and watches Ephram's eyes look at his neck. He leans forward and Ephram looks up again. He blinks and this, this is the way he knows words like supernova and artificial intelligence.  
  
He presses his lips to Ephram's and Ephram presses back.  
  
No taste memory, only touch. This is the moment he wants to catalogue forever, for when the sun goes dark.  
  
Then gravity pushes them apart.  
  
Ephram stares at him. They are frozen.  
  
And Ephram's shivering voice:  
  
"How do-what-"  
  
Colin doesn't know. Colin has no idea, because this doesn't happen, Ephram doesn't do this in any plausible universe. But then. Colin's never really thought he lives in a plausible universe.  
  
"I mean," Ephram says.  
  
Colin is suddenly very scared. They are pushing the boundaries of space and time and as much as Colin despises his life he doesn't quite want to destroy the world. Not like this. So he pulls up his shields.  
  
"Amy," he says.  
  
And it works, Ephram's hands spring from his arms, Ephram's leg is propelled from his lap. Colin's body is so polarized Ephram cannot even look at him. It works and Colin is entirely alone in his shield.  
  
"Yeah," Ephram says. "Amy."  
  
  
  
  
The cold of space is not quite vacuum, he thinks, sitting between Amy and Bright, breaking crumbs from the half-stale bread of his sandwich.  
  
It's more like a thin layer of rubbing alcohol, coating his entire body, ensuring chill and the lonely shudder of his breath.  
  
Ephram sits across the cafeteria, another kid talking to him rapidly. Ephram nods and stays silent.  
  
Colin is silent, too, and angry, and he hates physics, mechanics. He hates the universe.  
  
  
  
  
Colin buries his notepads in the back of his sock drawer. He wants to burn them, but he's seen the value of having evidence--proof of past mistakes. Plots and accidents, secrecies.  
  
At one in the morning on the last day before his sling comes off, he turns the television in his room on, volume low.  
  
He plays the theme in his head and he listens closely to the opening log entry.  
  
He watches as doubles appear, as the world goes strangely bad. It's confusing, but familiar. Familiar.  
  
And finally, the strangeness is explained as an alternate universe. One of many.  
  
One of many.  
  
  
  
  
Amy laughs and holds him and she turns his hand over and over in hers.  
  
"I love you," she says into his shoulder.  
  
He doesn't hate this universe. It is good. But it is so--  
  
"I love you," she says again.  
  
It is so unfair.  
  
  
  
  
In history Colin looks over his shoulder at Ephram and he touches his free wrist, his free elbow.  
  
Colin thinks that if it could happen in this universe just once, there must be a timeline out there in the continuum where it happens again, and more than that.  
  
That, he thinks, is a fascinating possibility.  
  
  
  
  
Amy and Bright drop him off at home and he walks away from the house, thinking. There must be a universe where it happens every day.  
  
If he takes the theory far enough.  
  
  
  
  
He takes his notepads out of his sock drawer and reads through them. He adds "relativity", "worm hole", and "chaos theory" to his lexicon. He puts the pads back under his pillow.  
  
  
  
  
There is a universe, he realises. Amy yawns and tightens her arm around his. There must be.  
  
Colin wonders how he can be so sure he doesn't live there.  
  
  
End.  
  



End file.
